From the editor’s desk: In October, Compact published a provocative essay by Helen Andrews titled “The Great Feminization” in which she argued that cancel culture is essentially feminine: “Cancel culture is simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field.” The thesis is not Andrews’. She borrowed it from the pseudonymous J. Stone and an essay [...]
Josie Luetke: The sympathetic protagonist trotted out by pro-choicers is the teenager who accidentally gets knocked up. Think Ellen Page in Juno or Shailene Woodley in The Secret Life of the American Teenager (disregarding the bit of trivia that both their characters gave birth). Yet, this stereotype hasn’t reflected reality for a while. According to Statistics Canada, in 1975, girls under 20 [...]
Victor Penney: Interim writer Victor Penney, Sporting Life College basketball has lost one of its impressive figures, and no, it wasn’t a lean, mean, dunking machine — it was a five-foot nun in a wheelchair. I’m talking about Sister Jean Dolores Schmidt, who died back on Oct. 9 at the tender age of 106. She was a Sister of Charity [...]
Rory Leishman: In yet another deeply disturbing development in the rapidly evolving science of in vitro fertilization (IVF), Professor Shoukrhat Mitalipov of the Oregon Health and Science University announced in a paper published in Nature Communications on Sept. 30 that a research team led by him has succeeded in transforming human skin cells into human eggs. Mitalipov anticipates that once this technique [...]
Donald DeMarco: I had a terrible dream last night. Maybe it was brought about by that extra slice of “everything on it” pizza I consumed before I retired. It was having its revenge. At any rate, the dream was not only terrifying, but it lasted a long time. I hastened to write it down before I forgot the incidents that rose to [...]
John Carpay: Interim writer, John Carpay, Law Matters If passed into law, the Combatting Hate Act (Bill C-9) will make Canada more like the increasingly authoritarian United Kingdom. U.K. police now arrest more than 30 people every day for offensive tweets, question citizens for political commentary, and have even arrested parents in front of their children, over private WhatsApp messages. [...]
Josie Luetke: Last month, I shared how Campaign Life Coalition, with the help of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, is legally challenging the rules barring abortion victim photography or any “signs or banners that display explicit graphic violence or blood” on Parliament Hill. Our hearing date, originally scheduled for Oct. 2, has been postponed, but since I last wrote, the respondents, [...]
Rick McGinnis: Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements Last month, critic Ted Gioia published an article on his Substack site, The Honest Broker, titled “Is Mid-20th Century American Culture Getting Erased?” He begins by responding to an Atlantic magazine story about the writer John Cheever, once a major figure in American literature until his death in 1982, though as the writer [...]
Rory Leishman: The Free Press is an outstanding, new media company founded and edited by Bari Weiss, a former columnist for The New York Times who quit that newspaper in disgust over its woke, left-wing ideological bias. In her letter of resignation, she charged that at The Times: “Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, [...]
John Carpay: For power-hungry tyrants, government control over the internet is non-negotiable. The internet facilitates the exercise of our Charter freedoms, including freedom of expression, association, and even conscience and religion. Tyranny does not thrive and flourish when free people can communicate with each other freely. First, the federal Online News Act required social media companies to compensate news outlets for any [...]
Victor Penney: Interim writer Victor Penney, Sporting Life Do you know why we have the stereotype that professional athletes are into gambling, partying hard, and having babies out of wedlock with multiple women? Precedent. I don’t need to point to any specific examples here, but you know I’m right. Let’s face it: Pro-sports is a world that seems to enable [...]
From the editor’s desk: From the editor's desk On pages 14 and 15 of this issue we have book reviews of three giants of mid-20th century conservatism: William F. Buckley, Frank S. Meyer, and James Burnham. All three were at the founding of National Review, a magazine that has shaped U.S. conservatism since its founding 70 Novembers ago in 1955. [...]
Paul Tuns, Review: James Burnham: An Intellectual Biography by David T. Byrne (Northern Illinois University Press, $45.95, 242 pages) James Burnham, like many of those on the political Right in the second half of the 20th century, migrated there from the Left. Historian David T. Byrne examines the intellectual journey of this foundational conservative thinker from literary critic and Trotskyite philosopher to one [...]
Paul Tuns, Review: The Man who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer by Daniel Flynn (Encounter, $54.99, 544 pages) Frank Meyer is the most important conservative whose name you never heard. Perhaps more than anyone not named William F. Buckley, he shaped American conservatism to adopt the seemingly contradictory stances of promoting a socially dynamic economic freedom with respect for [...]
Paul Tuns, Review: Buckley: The Life and Revolution that Changed America by Sam Tanenhaus (Random House, $54, 1018 pages) The conservative columnist George F. Will says that before there was Ronald Reagan there was Barry Goldwater, that before that there was Goldwater there was National Review magazine, and before NR there was its founder William F. Buckley. Buckley was without doubt, the most influential [...]